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Sep 15, 2018

Dermer: I didn't tell Netanyahu about Keyes warning

The Netanyahu confidant was told in 2016 about the top aide's history of sexual misconduct.
Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, a close confidant of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Friday that he did not pass on a
2016 warning about David Keyes to the prime minister.

Keyes, the prime minister's spokesman for foreign media, took a leave of
absence from his job on Thursday after a series of accusations of
sexual misconduct - including several allegations of sexual assault.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Bret Stephens, at the time
the deputy opinion editor of the Wall Street Journal, warned Dermer in
2016 that Keyes posed a risk to women employed by the Israeli
government. Dermer confirmed the conversation on Friday, but said the
information was not passed on to Netanyahu.

"The ambassador received a phone call from Bret Stephens more than six
months after David Keyes began working in the Prime Minister’s Office,
regarding behavior attributed to Keyes before he joined the office,”
according to a statement from Dermer’s office.

“Information of the call was not conveyed to the Prime Minister's
Office. If Stephens or anyone else had given the ambassador information
on sexual assault or any other criminal act towards women by anyone in
the Prime Minister's Office - whether before or after their appointment -
he would have immediately notified the Prime Minister's Office.”

On Saturday evening, Meretz MK Michal Rozin wrote a letter to the civil
service commissioner, calling for an immediate investigation into the
incident and Dermer's behavior.

"It cannot be that turning a blind eye and avoiding responsibility
constitutes a flak jacket for this apparent failure," said Rozin, the
former director of the Association for Rape Crisis Centers in Israel,
"especially when above all is the thunderous silence of the prime
minister." Stephens, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post
who is currently a New York Times columnist, has not spoken publicly
about his conversation with Dermer.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Stephens told Dermer in
2016 that Keyes posed a risk to Israeli women employed in government
offices.

In 2013, while Stephens was the deputy opinion editor at the Wall Street
Journal, Keyes was barred from the newspaper's offices after repeated
advances on young women who worked there.

Over the past week, at least a dozen accusations of sexual harassment,
assault and unwanted workplace advances have emerged against Keyes.

"The difference between [fellow Zionist Union MK Eitan] Broshi," who has
been accused of sexual harassment, "and between someone who works in
the Prime Minister's Office, is that we can't fire an elected
representative," Livni said in remarks in Holon. "The prime minister,
in order to kick out of his office a serial harasser, just needs to tell
him to go."